


Cruel Mercy

by SectoBoss



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 'Wraith' Mercy instead of Gabriel, AU, Based on a Tumblr Post, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, McCree is still an outlaw, Origin Story, and Reyes and Morrison tried to heal her with her tech, but Overwatch looks very different, it could not possibly go well, what if Mercy was injured in Zurich
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-19 23:07:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7381246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During Gabriel and Jack's confrontation in Zurich, Mercy is mortally wounded. In desperation, the two use her own experimental medicines to keep her alive long enough to get her to safety - and in doing so, create something horrific.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this came from [this tumblr post](http://en123.tumblr.com/post/146392194876/au-for-overwatch-idea).  
> I was hoping my first Overwatch fic would be something less miserable, but hey, what can you do?

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

It hadn’t been supposed to go _this_ way, Gabriel Reyes thought desperately to himself as he wiped his bloody hands on his overcoat. There was blood on his coat too – anti-ballistic weave over his standard-issue Blackwatch uniform, good at stopping bullets but terrible at absorbing liquids – and all he managed to do was smear the blood around a bit. His hands came away worse than before and he tried not to think about it.

“Hang in there, Angie,” he croaked. “Don’t you dare fade away on me.”

In his arms, Dr Zeigler made a thick, wet noise that might have been a laugh.

“T-that’s… supposed… to be my line…” she gasped, a small trickle of blood leaking out from between her lips and trickling down towards the collar of her armour. Gabriel wiped it away before it could reach the pristine white of the Valkyrie suit.

Somewhere deep below them, in the bowels of the building, there was a muffled rumble. Another support column giving way? A chunk of masonry fell from the ceiling. They didn’t have much time left.

“Jack’ll be back any minute,” he said, trying to sound confident.

“No use… n-never get it… to w-work…”

There was a horrible sucking noise as she tried to draw another breath.

“Shush, Angie, don’t try to talk,” Gabriel insisted. “Just stay with me, okay?”

“N-no… _listen_ to… to me, Gabe. It w-won’t _work…_ ”

She was shivering, her perfect white teeth starting to clatter together. Gabriel recognised a dying person going into shock when he saw it. He shifted her in his arms, remembering the medical training the army had given him. _Lower the head, remove tight clothing around the neck and chest. Keep blood flowing to the head._

But there wasn’t much of Angela’s blood left.

“Angie,” he said, doing all he could to keep his voice steady, “Angie you’ve got to stay with me. Focus on me, on my voice.” And then, under his breath, “ _joder_ , Jack, where are you?”

From below, another crash, and the floor beneath them shook. Could he smell smoke? Under her blood-spattered armour, Gabriel felt Angela’s torso twitch and spasm.

“You… always w-with the Spanish… w-when y-you’re upset…” she coughed, fixing him with a weak smile.

“You can thank my abuela for that,” he said with a grin as hollow as hers. “And believe me, if Jack doesn’t get back here soon I’m going to give him the _mother_ of all Spanish lessons. I’m going to take the damn boy back to _school_.”

She actually found the strength to laugh at that. But then more blood passed her lips, and it became a wracking cough.

“L-listen to you… l-like n-n-nothing had ever… had ever happened.”

“Don’t say that, Angie.”

“I suppose… now we know…” Angela paused to take another heaving gasp of air, “…we know w-what it t-takes… to g-get you t-two back together…”

“ _Don’t say that_.”

“S’true…”

Gabriel turned his face away from her for a second so she couldn’t see the expression on it.

He’d come here to kill Jack, with two loaded shotguns and a bomb big enough to level the place. He’d set the bomb off in the lowest levels and headed up, knowing he’d meet Jack coming down to investigate. It was supposed to just be the two of them in the basement of Overwatch’s Zurich headquarters. It was supposed to be Jack bleeding out in his arms, choking his last. Or him, in Jack’s. Towards the end he hadn’t really cared.

But dear Angela, the one who’d kept them all going through thick and thin and who no-one had a bad word for, had been there too. Putting in a few extra hours before she went home. So she’d gotten caught up in it all, and then a bullet meant for one of them had found her instead. Gabriel didn’t even know whose bullet had cut her down as she screamed at them to stop. Hardly mattered, anyway – they were both equally guilty.

He turned back to her. Angela’s face was ghastly pale and her eyelids were starting to droop. Alarmed, he leaned down and gently shook her.

“Angie? Angie!”

“Wha…?”

“Stay with me. _Don’t go to sleep_.”

“W-whatever you say… G-Gabe…”

 _Keep talking. Give her something to think about. Don’t let her drift away._ Gabriel wracked his mind for something to say. He could definitely smell smoke, he realised distantly.

“You know, when this is all over, we’re redesigning your suit, Angie. It needs to be a lot more bulletproof.” _Gallows humour_ , he thought bitterly to himself. _Nice._

“Y-you leave m-my suit alone,” Angela wheezed, managing a little smirk. “She’s… s-served me well… so far…”

“Still needs some upgrades, though. And an air freshener, while we’re on the topic. _Dios_ , Angie, have you never smelled yourself after a whole day in that thing?”

Angela gave him a look that said _it’s a good job I’m dying, or you’d be dead,_ then grinned as widely as she could. Gabriel tried to ignore how her teeth were sticky and red with her blood.

Booted footsteps rang out behind him, clattering on the metal floor, and he turned to see Jack sprinting down the corridor towards them. His own overcoat – sky blue to Gabriel’s black – billowed out behind him like it had a life of his own. He had Angela’s staff in one hand and a massive white crate tucked under his other arm.

Gabriel set Angela down carefully and stood up as Jack skidded to a halt next to them.

“I got them,” Jack panted, out of breath and sweating, as he set the crate down next to Angela with a heavy _clunk_.

“And what the _hell_ took you so long?” Gabriel hissed, hands balling into fists.

Jack raised his hands, palms-out, defensive. “She keeps them locked up! I had to try and guess the password…”

Gabriel just turned away from him, kneeling down next to Angela. He opened the crate, examined the vials of glowing yellow liquid inside. There were a few notes in the crate as well, written in Angela’s neat handwriting, but they were in German and he couldn’t read them.

“Angela,” said Jack, behind him, “please… you have to tell us what to do!”

It took Angela a moment to speak. “Just… just l-leave me…” she gasped.

“No way!”

“Never!”

They spoke almost in unison. Angela smiled sadly.

“You two… l-like silly… silly little b-boys… _go_.”

As if to underline her point, another deep _boom_ echoed up from below them. The floor shook and cracks started to snake up the concrete walls. The smell of smoke in the air was unmistakeable now, and Gabriel thought the air was starting to look a bit hazy.

“To hell with that,” Jack muttered, and for the first time in a long time Gabriel nodded in agreement. “Can’t be too hard,” he said back. “Right?”

“What is it she normally does?” Jack asked, inspecting the staff in his hands. “Just turn this thing on and… let it work its magic?”

From the floor, Angela moaned weakly. “N-no… l-leave it… _get out of here_ …”

“In the field, yeah, and then shoots us up with this stuff when we get back,” Gabriel said, lifting one of the vials of golden liquid from the case and slotting it into a syringe gun strapped to the inside of the lid.

Angela’s next words were muffled by another explosion and the crash of collapsing supports. In the years to come, replaying that awful day in his mind over and over again, Gabriel would come to realise she had said “experimental… dangerous…”

Although by then, he knew that.

Back in the present, Jack gave Angela one of his trademark winning smiles. “See? We’ll have you on your feet in no time, doc.”

Something caught in the back of Gabriel’s throat and made him cough. _Smoke from the bomb_ , he realised. _If it’s reached us, then we’re out of time._

“We need to hurry,” he spluttered, and reached over towards Angela with the syringe gun. She shied away from him, looked at him with pleading eyes.

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Jack said, and flicked the switch to turn the staff on. Bright yellow light began to spill from its tip.

Gabriel reached forward and jammed the syringe into Angela’s neck. He felt the gentle pressure on his chest as she desperately tried to push him away but he was so frantic he barely noticed. Jack angled the staff to let the golden beam start playing across Angela’s body. Angela coughed once more. Hot blood spattered up Gabriel’s face and neck.

And then there was an ear-splitting _crash_ as something vital in the building’s structure gave way. A scream of tortured metal drowned out everything else in the world. The concrete below them cracked and Gabriel felt his stomach lurch as he began to fall. The world span crazily before his eyes for a moment and his hands scrabbled at empty air. The floor fell away as the concrete crumbled and Gabriel was suspended above the empty air, nothing between him and the blazing basement of the Overwatch command centre but the smoke from the fires.

A hand grabbed him by his coat collar and yanked him to a painful halt, knocking the wind from him. In a daze he looked around, at the fire below him that his bomb had caused, at the hole in the concrete he was dangling through, at Jack clinging onto him with all his might – at Angela, with no-one to catch her, plummeting down towards the fire below, staff falling alongside her and that syringe gun still in her neck.

“ _Angela!_ ” Gabriel screamed, reaching out for her, but she was too far away, far too far, and as Jack hauled him to safety with a roar of effort the last he saw of her was her wide blue eyes and the golden glow of her medicine before the smoke swallowed her whole.

“ _Angela!_ ” he screamed again, and again, even as Jack pulled him back from the widening hole in the floor and yelled about how they had to get out of there, how the whole place was about to come down on top of them.

“We have to go back! We have to get her!”

“Gabe, for God’s sake! There’s no way we’d make it down there, let alone back up with her! We have to get out!”

“No! We can’t just leave her!”

“Gabe, she’s _dead_! That’s the generator room down there, it’s a thirty-foot drop! I’m sorry, Gabe, she’s gone!”

“ _You don’t know that!_ ”

But he did, they both did, although in that desperate moment Gabriel would rather die than admit it. Yet he allowed Jack to take his hand, lead him up and out of the collapsing building, dodging collapsing ceilings and licking flames, into the clear air outside.

They sat together in a miserable silence, watching smoke billow from the wreckage as the first emergency crews arrived and began hosing the building down with water and foam. Humans and omnics scurried over the ruins like ants over a carcass, pulling side twisted beams and heaps of brick and concrete. Gabriel wondered if they were looking for survivors, or just looking to count the dead. Jack didn’t say a word.

They left once the news cameras turned up, neither of them willing to be spotted at the scene.

An hour later, Gabriel and Jack parted ways outside Zurich International Airport. Later, Gabriel would always wonder whether they had intended it to be for the last time.

“Her password was Gabriel,” Jack said, his breath frosting in the cold night air, as he looked anywhere but the face of his old friend.

“…what?”

“For her staff. The case she kept it in. Her computer too.”

“I don’t…” Gabriel spluttered, trying to parse this new information.

“I was going to go back and ask her, but I tried a few guesses and… open sesame.”

“I… I see.”

All of a sudden Jack’s eyes were boring into his.

“Her account will still be on the Overwatch mainframe for a few days. If you find anything useful in it, promise me you’ll do right by her memory.”

“I wasn’t going to pry,” Gabriel huffed, and crossed his arms.

“Of course you weren’t,” Jack said, no emotion in his voice at all. It was the last time Gabriel Reyes would hear Jack Morrison speak.

They were silent for a few more minutes. A few snowflakes danced in the air between them. At last Jack turned on his heel and stalked off towards the airport terminal. Where he was going, Gabriel didn’t ask.

“I promise,” Gabriel called after him.

Jack stopped, turned, and nodded. Then he carried on, and within seconds Gabriel had lost sight of him in the crowds of passengers.

 

* * *

 

Beneath metres of charred soil and cooling rubble, under warped rebar that clicked as it cooled and a thick layer of smothering ash, something golden gave one last electric spark and then went dark.

**…Valkyrie Response Suit on-board diagnostics…  
**

…what? Where am I…

_…awake…_

**…flight syst[ERROR] severe damage…  
**

…what happened to me…

_…alive alive keep us alive…  
_

**…communications online… [ERROR] …offline…  
**

…it hurts...

_…broken bleeding punctured shattered …  
_

…am I dead...

_…multiply repair digest multiply…  
_

…the nanites… oh God… no please no…

**...[ERROR] [ERROR] system crash…system restore… _(error)…  
_**

…too _much_ injected too much what **is** hap _pening to **us** to me to we…  
_

**…[WARNING: USER DEATH IMMINENT]…**

_…never die…  
_

…no no no o **h Jack** oh _Gabe **what** have you done_ **to _me_** …

 **...System** _restore_ **complete…** vital signs **… [ERROR]… [SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION]…**

…I… **_we…  
_**

... _am… **are…**_ **  
**

**_…hungry…_ ** _  
_

Wings of shadow spread, arms of smoke shoved the rubble aside, something dark and nameless crawled towards the starlit Zurich sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have some vague idea of where this could go next, so let me know if you'd like to see it. And I hope you liked this!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt like writing some McCree, so here we go! next chapter will have Gabriel and maybe Jack in it, for those who were hoping to see them again. Now, let's see what wraith!Mercy can do...

_Years later_

The jail cell in the little town of New Eden, Arizona was an old meat locker left over from when its inhabitants had still been mostly humans. Ten feet square and bare metal walls, it looked like it could withstand a small bomb blast. Certainly, nothing in Jesse McCree’s pockets could have made a dent in it.

Not that he could reach his pockets. His hands were gently but firmly bound in a pair of impromptu cuffs his captors had made by bending an old bit of steel rebar. He had enough leeway to scratch his nose, and that was about it.                                                                   

 _At least they remembered to leave me a bucket to take a leak in,_ he thought to himself with a rueful smile.

There were no windows in the cell – dead meat doesn’t need a nice view – but Jesse was a veteran of being locked up in airless dungeons like this one and over the years had developed a knack for telling the time. By his estimation, if he’d slept for six hours like he usually did, it must be sunrise outside by now.

Something that sounded promisingly like a set of keys rattled faintly on the other side of the door. Jesse’s ears pricked up.

“Hey!” he hollered. “If it’s breakfast time, I take my coffee black!”

The lock _clunked_ open and the door swung aside on rusty hinges. A humanoid figure was silhouetted against the orange dawn outside.

“Very funny, McCree,” a synthesised voice droned.

“Hey, it got cold in here last night. Need a sense of humour to keep me warm.”

His eyes adjusted to the light as the figure stepped into the cell. The deputy sheriff of New Eden eyed him through a whirring camera lens and drummed her metal fingers on her forearm in a staccato _tak-tak_. Like just about everyone else in New Eden (“Population: 249 and Not Falling Yet!”, according to the sign that greeted travellers coming in from Highway 93), the deputy was an Omnic.

“Sheriff wants to see you,” she said, inclining her head towards the open cell door with a whirr of servos. She was an older model and her joints weren’t as quiet as they used to be. “If I take those cuffs off of you, are you going to give me any trouble?”

“No, ma’am,” he said gratefully. Never let it be said Jesse McCree was impolite to someone offering to untie him.

“Well, then,” she hummed, and motioned for him to hold his wrists out. He did so, and she unbent the rebar that cuffed them like a human might untie a piece of string. The metal was left ruler-straight like it had just come from the factory. She slotted it into a hole in her chassis. “This way.”

Jesse made a mental note to keep in her good books.

The rising sun warmed his back as he followed her down New Eden’s main street, passing the dusty pre-fab houses, single saloon and dilapidated church that made up the town centre. They stopped outside a small 3D-printed building with the words ‘Sheriff’s Office’ etched neatly into the plastic above the doorway.

“In you go,” the deputy said, and shoved him gently through the door.

His eyes once again had to adjust, but once they did he found a chair and sat down opposite a burly ex-military Omnic which was sat behind a flimsy wooden desk. Not just ex-military, Jesse realised as he looked closer, but ex-special forces. A sleek exoskeleton with inconspicuous little vents in the armour that screamed _this is where the hidden blades pop out_. Jesse decided it would be a bad idea to make fun of the Omnic sheriff’s preposterously huge Stetson hat that perched on its angular head.

“Jesse McCree?” the Omnic rumbled. “Nice of you to drop by.”

“Nice place you got here.”

“New Eden’s not much, McCree, but it’s ours. We tend our solar farms, trade watts for coolant with merchants coming off Highway 93, keep to ourselves. Omnics come here for a quiet life and a place of their own. They don’t come for the kind of trouble that follows a man like you.”

“Then just point me out of town. I only stopped for a place to rest my head for the night and your deputy saw to that, I guess. No sense in keeping me here if trouble’s on my heels.”

“Not so fast.”

 _Here we go_ , Jesse thought to himself.

“New Eden isn’t exactly prosperous, McCree. And as a former agent of Blackwatch, you’ve got quite the price on your head. I have to wonder, how much would your old pals in Overwatch pay me to turn you in?”

The Omnics had taken his gun and his flashbangs, and Jesse didn’t rate his chances unarmed against the sheriff, so he sat still.

“But on the other hand,” the sheriff sighed, “what good’s money if you can’t spend it?”

Jesse frowned. “Not sure I follow.”

“We’ve got a bandit problem here in New Eden,” the sheriff explained. “Bunch of lowlifes, holed up in some old abandoned Overwatch Watchpoint a few miles across the desert to the east. They’re into the typical stuff: break our solar panels, burgle our homes, wreck up the place at night. But they’re getting bolder the longer we do nothing. The longer _I_ do nothing. Last time they came in broad daylight and nearly killed one of us.”

Jesse began to see where this was going.

“Now, I could go sort them out,” the sheriff continued, flexing its hands, “but I can’t be in two places at once. What if they attack while I’m away?”

“But if someone were to go to the Watchpoint, while you stayed here to guard the town…” Jesse said airily, as if he were just hypothesising.

“I’d certainly be very grateful. Grateful enough to send them on their way with a flagon of water or two and an order for our town’s mechanic to take a look at any prosthetics they may or may not have, free of charge. And, grateful enough to forget they were ever here the moment they left.”

Jesse grinned. “Knew this place felt like my kind of town. Think I might know a guy, sheriff. Just point the way.”

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later, Jesse McCree was on a hoverbike heading east into the rising sun.

The sheriff had given him his Peacekeeper back and some directions, but Jesse already knew where he was headed. Watchpoint: Mojave had been one of his haunts, back in the good old days. It wasn’t a big place, like Grand Mesa or Gibraltar. Just a furnished hollow in the rock where Overwatch agents could rest and regroup.

The hoverbike kicked up a trail of dust behind it as it sped along. If they had any lookouts, the gang would see him coming. So he had to move fast. Jesse kicked the bike’s engines up a gear, urging it onwards. His serape whipped out behind him and he kept his head bowed to stop his hat from catching the wind and flying off.

Watchpoint: Mojave’s entrance was built into a rock formation and Jesse’s sharp eyes spotted it from miles away. He steered around an outcrop and a few lonely cacti and pointed the hoverbike towards it. As he drew closer he scanned the rock face, looking for anyone who might spot him coming. No-one there. So either the gang was stupid enough to not post a guard, or smart enough to make sure the guard was hidden.

As he drew closer Jesse noticed some black specks in the sky over the Watchpoint. Carrion birds, vultures perhaps, or ravens.

“If ever there was a bad omen,” Jesse growled to himself, behind the facewrap to keep the dust from his mouth and eyes.

He pulled the hoverbike to a halt outside the large blast doors of the Watchpoint and jumped off, muscles tense, expecting a shot to ring out at any moment. He scurried for cover behind a large boulder and peered over the top of it, watching for any sign of movement.

Apart from the birds in the sky and the occasional lizard in the dry scrub, nothing.

Jesse began to get a nervous feeling in his gut. He stepped out from behind the rock. Started to walk towards the open doors, and then stopped dead.

The blast doors were open. Twelve feet tall, two feet thick, solid steel – and they’d been torn open like paper. One hung drunkenly from its last hinge. The other lay in the shadows inside the Watchpoint’s entrance. Both were mangled and dented.

And propped up next to the fallen one, like a broken puppet, was a man.

If this was a trap it was the best Jesse had ever seen. So he threw caution to the wind and jogged over, his mind racing. He reached the fallen man, and his stomach recoiled.

The guy was a mess. His arms were bent at unnatural angles, his legs smashed. There were deep wounds in his arms and torso, like something big had clawed at him. Fighting his gorge back down, Jesse bent to inspect him. From his face the guy looked Latino, Mexican maybe, but his skin was deathly pale and it was flaking off in big clumps like he had some horrible disease.

A small cloud of flies buzzed around his exposed guts. One settled on the man’s eyeball and began to drink.

“What the hell happened to you, friend?” Jesse murmured, moving to close the man’s eyes.

Suddenly the man gurgled, choked, coughed. The flies on him scattered with an agitated buzz. Jesse’s hand flew to his holster on instinct. _Jesus, he’s still alive!_

“P-por favor…” the man spluttered. “Agua…”

_Poor guy wants water. Bullet’d serve him better._

Jesse’s Spanish was rusty but serviceable. “¿Que pasó?” _What happened?_

“Agua… por favor… a-ayud… ayudame...” _Help me._

Rule number one in the desert: don’t waste water. And giving it to this man would be a waste, anyone could see that. But Jesse still pulled out his canteen and poured a little bit into the man’s mouth. The man gasped gratefully.

“¿Quien hizo esto, amigo?” Jesse asked gently. _Who did this, friend?_

“M-Muerte… Santa Muerte…” the man wheezed.

Jesse’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Huh?”

But the man was gone.

Jesse let him slump back, closed the man’s eyes, and then stood up. _Santa Muerte._ The Mexican saint of the dead. Meant to be a nice lady, if you didn’t cross her. Jesse had laid some offerings at her shrines himself, in his time. Not the type to tear a man up and leave him dying in the heat of the sun.

His instincts were screaming at him to get out of there, to take the hoverbike and ride at full tilt away from the Watchpoint. But the sheriff had been clear: if he didn’t hear from McCree within a few hours he’d call Overwatch. And they would come and either pick up McCree’s corpse from the Watchpoint, or hunt him down in the desert like a rat.

“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” Jesse growled to himself, unslung his gun, and stepped into the shadows of the Watchpoint’s entrance.

 

* * *

 

Jesse guessed the place was supposed to have been properly decommissioned after the Petras Act shut down Blackwatch and neutered Overwatch, but clearly that hadn’t happened. The electric lights still worked – some of them, anyway. From the noises the pipes made there was still water in them. All in all, not a bad place to hole up.

He supposed there were a hundred places like Watchpoint: Mojave scattered across the world these days. Shut down but not demolished, left to a slow decay. _Like Overwatch itself_ , he thought with a scowl. Sometimes he wondered if Petras should have just shut Overwatch down rather than take its teeth out. Might have been kinder.

But he didn’t think about that too much. Didn’t think about anything other than creeping down the silent corridors, Peacekeeper at the ready.

“Athena, you there?” he whispered. It was a long shot, but maybe Overwatch’s AI still kept an eye on this place. No response from the speakers in the ceiling but a faint crackle of static.

Barracks, empty but showing signs of have been lived in. Posters on the walls, too graphic to have been allowed by Overwatch and left behind. Stained sheets in the beds. Blood on the floor and up the walls and a broken tooth by the door. The blood tracked out and down the corridor, further into the base, like someone had been dragged.

Kitchen, empty but used. A pot of stew, cold and congealed, still on the hob. Dirty dishes in the sink. Pots and pans strewn everywhere. Spent brass on the floor, blood on the walls. Again, the blood tracked out the door and down the corridor.

Armoury, full of guns but no signs of life. The guns were cheap, sub-standard, not Overwatch quality by any stretch of the imagination. A wrecked Omnic lay in a heap in one corner. Jesse couldn’t tell if it had been a gang member or someone the gang had killed. More spent brass, for handguns and shotguns. People here had put up a fight.

Rec room, empty. Gym, full of crates but otherwise empty. Shower room, empty except for a severed human arm. The cut was not clean. Ligaments trailed from the bloody stump like wires. Generator room, empty but for the chug of old hydrogen cells. Another wrecked Omnic in the laundry room, this one covered in gang paint. Someone had wanted the humans but not the machines. Blood everywhere, all leading down.

Last room. Local server core, where Athena had run the day-to-day of the base back in the old days. Jesse paused outside the door, hands slick with sweat, pulse racing. The blood trails all led here. Whatever was on the other side of the door, wouldn’t be pretty.

He swallowed once, breathed a tiny prayer, and shoved the door open.

The stench hit him first, a great waft of rot and decay that stung his eyes and forced its way down his throat to make his stomach churn. He gagged, retched, but kept his gun steady, scanned the room for anything hostile, not letting himself notice the details until he was sure the room was safe.

Nothing moved. Jesse lowered his gun an inch and couldn’t ignore what he saw any longer.

The room was lit only by the light of an enormous screen that took up the opposite wall. Lines of computer code spilled across the screen, white on black, flickering and changing. And in the glow Jesse could see twenty bodies, maybe more, scattered around the room like a child had thrown its dolls about in a tantrum. He guessed he’d found the gang. All of them were twisted and broken, mangled and smashed. All of them with a deathly pallor to them that couldn’t be natural. And… was that _smoke_? Coming from the bodies?

“What in God’s name…” Jesse whispered.

Something moved.

From behind a server stack halfway between him and the far-wall screen a cloud of smoke or steam billowed and for a moment Jesse thought the stack had caught fire. He took a step back. And then something emerged from the smoke – or did the smoke congeal? – something white and gold, black and red, that glared at him from crimson eyes.

Jesse nearly dropped his gun. His mouth flopped open in surprise and it took him a minute to find his voice.

“…Angela?” he gasped.

A woman he thought long dead stared back at him from a ruined face.

Her words, when she spoke, sounded like she was chewing gravel. “ _Intrusion… error…_ w-w-who’s there?”

“Angela? But… what… how come…?”

“ _Diagnose…_ Jesse... is… is that you?”

“Angela! What’s going on? How… how are you alive? What happened to you? What happened _here_?”

Angela’s expression softened for a second, although her eyes still burned like coals.

“Jesse… you have to go… get out of-” Then her eyes narrowed again and she bared jagged teeth. “ _V-Vital… alert… intrusion…_ Jesse… _expunge… cauterise…_ run…”

Jesse wasn’t one to run without answers. But he was at least smart enough to raise his gun again.

“What? No! Angela, talk to me, what in the hell’s going _on_ here?”

Jesse’s attention was focused on the woman in front of him, he didn’t notice what was happening around him. The tendrils of smoke he thought he’d seen rising from the bodies of the gang grew more solid, rose higher, pointed inwards towards Zeigler.

Backlit by the screen behind her and its squirming lines of computer code, all Jesse could see of her face now were her glowing eyes and snarling mouth. Smoke flickered around her.

“Angela…”

Jesse didn’t get any further. Angela screamed, a horrid ear-splitting screech, and lunged at him. Her suit’s wings blossomed from her back as she moved – not the gold beams he was used to, Jesse noted distantly, but dark and murky – and he barely dived out of the way in time. She shot past him and landed on all fours between him and the door. Jesse raised his gun, took aim – and hesitated.

Angela didn’t waste the advantage. All of a sudden her staff was in her hand, popping out of a slot on her armour’s back and telescoping to its full length, and she swung it at his head like a baseball bat. Jesse dodged but not fast enough and the tip of it grazed his skull and slammed him backwards. He reeled and saw stars.

Angela brought the staff round again but Jesse managed to dodge it this time and rolled to one side. He brought his gun up and this time he found the will to pull the trigger.

The gun’s roar was deafening in the close confines of the server room. Angela didn’t even flinch. Where the bullet hit – right in her stomach, Jesse had aimed for a crack in the armour – disappeared into a vortex of shadow. Jesse caught a glimpse of her twisting guts and other organs he had no names for and then for a brief second he could have sworn he was looking straight _through_ her, like she’d opened up a hole right through her belly. The bullet smacked harmlessly into the wall behind her, raising a puff of dust. The smoke cleared and she was whole again.

Jesse stared in confusion at her, at his gun, at her again. For a moment Angela grinned like he remembered she used to.

“ _I am getting better at this_ ,” she chuckled.

Her free hand went to her hip and that little gun of hers was suddenly in it.

“I’m… s-sorry…Jesse…”

Jesse found himself staring down a barrel and acted completely on instinct.

The flashbang exploded less than a metre from Angela’s face and she screamed in agony and fury. She fired blindly with her pistol but her shots went wide, Jesse had already hurled himself to safety behind a server tower. He heard the shots _plink_ and _crunch_ uselessly into the circuitry around him.

 _It’s not Angela,_ he thought as he steeled himself. _Can’t be. She’s dead, we buried her… I’m just, what? Puttin’ down what’s left? Whatever that even means._

_God help me._

Angela was still staggering blindly towards him, snarling, as he stepped out from his cover and fired. Four shots, loud enough to make his tortured ears scream, one-two-three-four catching her in the belly, the torso, the shoulder, the neck. The first two whipped through her like she wasn’t there but she was distracted, disorientated, not fast enough to dodge them all. The last two found their marks. Angela crumpled to the floor and lay there twitching.

Jesse approached her gingerly, stepping around one of the corpses strewn about the place. One bullet left in the cylinder. This one for her head. If it doesn’t die when you shoot it in the head it won’t die at all.

“I’m sorry, Angela,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “But you ‘aint giving me a lot of options here.”

She glared up at him, blood leaking from her ruined throat. Black blood that crawled away across the floor like it had its own errands to run.

“ _…never… die…_ ”

“What?”

That black smoke flowed from her, towards him, past him, out into the room. Twenty tendrils for twenty corpses, Jesse realised with sudden horror.

Across the room, a man with his belly cut open and his jaw torn off sat up like a marionette puppet and eyed him balefully. A woman with no legs rolled onto her belly and started crawling towards him. All around him the dead started clambering slowly to their feet.

Something closed around his ankle. He looked down and saw a maggot-white hand gripping him, its owner leering up at him from empty sockets. Jesse swore, tried to pull free, couldn’t. He levelled his gun at the grinning corpse and pulled the trigger, blasting its head into pieces. The thing recoiled, gave a gurgling moan, its brains leaking from the shattered bowl of its skull like old porridge.

No bullets left now.

Behind him Angela was hauling herself to her feet, wounds stitching themselves back together.

As one, the zombies in front of him gasped out a choked cry.

“ _Jesse…_ ”

His nerve broke, and he ran.

He dodged another swing of Angela’s staff, just barely, and barrelled past her to the door. A bullet smacked into the concrete a centimetre from his head and the dust blinded him but he found the handle and shoved the door open as hard as he could. The fluorescent lights were painfully bright after the unlit room behind him. The blood on the floor was still wet and he slipped and slid as he charged down the corridor, breath catching in his chest, eyes stinging with terrified tears. At any moment he expected cold fingers to latch onto the back of his neck, strong arms to grip his shoulders, claws to dig into his skin and drag him back.

He never knew whether Angela or any of those corpses ever even left the server room to follow him. Either way, they chased him up out of the Watchpoint, into the blinding Arizona sun, and across half the desert back to New Eden.

 

* * *

 

The nanites were unstable in such quantities and they decayed quickly. The last of the reanimated corpses slumped to the floor and lay still.

Dr Angela Zeigler watched it fall. Shreds of smoke rose from around the room, flowed under her armour, and disappeared. In an instant she looked like she always had, if not for the broken and battered Valkyrie suit and the pallor of her skin. And those furious red eyes.

Above her, high in the rafters of Watchpoint: Mojave’s server room, a shadow detached itself from the rest and dropped down next to her with barely a sound.

“That was… impressive,” her companion said. “Like something from a film. Une armée des morts.” _An army of the dead._

A corpse-cold hand was laid on her shoulder, red goggles glowed in the half-light to match Angela’s eyes.

“Ça va?” _You okay?  
_

“Bien, merci.” Angela’s voice was changing, growing more coherent as the nanites that sustained her returned home, patched her body and mind back up. They smoothed out the cracks in the thing that had once been Angela Zeigler, the Valkyrie suit and a lethally large nanobiotic swarm, and which was now the sum of all three. “… and… _advisory…_ stick to English. French means you need another… _treatment…_ ”

Icy eyes watched her.

“Don’t worry,” she added, “ _discretion…_ je ne vais pas dire une âme.” _I won’t tell a soul._

Angela ground her jaw a few times, as if chewing on something tough. The lights in her eyes blazed bright for a second before dulling again. Inside her head she sifted through the memories of the dead thugs around her, borne back by her smoke. “I wonder how Jesse found us…”

“Sans importance.” _Irrelevant._ “We have what we need.”

There, at the bottom of the screen’s spilling code: [DOWNLOAD COMPLETE]

 

* * *

 

Jesse got back to New Eden in record time and barged into the sheriff’s office before the Omnic even had the time to register his footsteps outside the door. The sheriff took one look at him – dusty, streaked with blood, an expression it found difficult to read on his face – and offered him a glass of cold water. It was the only thing a town full of Omnics could really offer a human.

He demanded a vid-link, a cell phone, hell, even an old-fashioned landline if it came to it. Eventually someone found an ancient videophone and he vanished into a back room to use it.

The sheriff was nosey, like all good small-town sheriffs, and stayed behind to listen through the door.

A robotic voice, dripping with the flat inflection of an AI: “You have reached the Overwatch central command grid. Please state your intent.”

McCree, words hurried and rushed, under stress: “Get me Medical Director Reyes, Athena. _Now_.”

“One moment.”

A pause. Then another human voice, sleepy, distorted by the bad connection: “Reyes speaking. Who…?”

“Gabriel.”

“Jesse… my God… what’s _happened_ to you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Muttered so quiet even the precision microphones of the Omnic could barely hear: “More like _Santa Muerte_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may be able to tell, I can speak neither Spanish nor French, so apologies for any mistranslations. I hope you liked it!


End file.
